The Elements: A Visual History of Their Discovery

Philip Ball

ISBN 10: 0500024537 / ISBN 13: 9780500024539

Published by THAMES HUDSON, 2021

2021. hardcover. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9780500024539

Synopsis:

This book offers a largely chronological illustrated guide to how the chemical elements were discovered over the past three millennia. It provides a view not just of how we came to understand what everything is made of but also of how chemistry developed from a trial-and-error craft of making and transforming substances into a rational modern science that provides us with new materials, drugs, and much else.

While other books have described the properties of the chemical elements and often delved into their histories, none has done so in this highly visual manner. The closest comparison is Theodore Gray’s illustrated book The Elements - but this does not take a historical approach as this does here. The pictorial material for this subject is very rich, including some gorgeous alchemical documents as well as portraits, colour charts, woodcuts of mining, artefacts such as John Dalton’s wooden balls, advertisements (for example, for radium 'cures') and postage stamps.

The book contains separate short sections for each element or groups of related elements, which are gathered into several sections to order the sequence into several chronological eras of element discovery. Included are short 'interludes' (or 'feature spreads') presenting important intellectual milestones in how we think about elements.

With 192 illustrations

About the Author: Philip Ball has written more than 20 books on scientific topics, including Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (which was awarded the Dingle Prize for books by the British Society for the History of Science), Critical Mass (which won the Aventis Science Books award in 2005), and A Very Short Introduction to The Elements, one of the VSI series from Oxford University Press. Philip is a presenter of the science history series Science Stories on BBC Radio 4. He holds a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a board member of its magazine Chemistry World, in which he writes a regular column.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Elements: A Visual History of Their ...
Publisher: THAMES HUDSON
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: New